Listen in to the audio podcast by pressing the play button using the Forrester player above. Folks have asked for me to be transparent in our research, so I’m pulling you all in behind the scenes as Charlene Li and I discuss the topics we research on.

Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, Peter Kim, and myself collaborated on Top Social Computing Predictions For 2008. While many folks have already published their predictions in Dec, now’s a good time for us to share after the noise has settled down.

Thanks for the predictions. I agree with Charlene. It’s becoming difficult to manage various Social Network relationships as they’re expressed on different sites. I look forward to an easier interface.

I strongly disagree that there is only one or a few “social graphs”. I feel that for every phenomenon — e.g. “web strategy” there are separate social graphs (e.g. the http://web-strategist.com graph , which shows all of the “real” relationships people have to the phenomenon of “web-strategy” [or the role of the “web-strategy manager”, i.e. “web-strategist”; and in particular the “web-streatgist in a commercial setting”]). So I do not find it unreasonable at all that there are presently over 100 million social graphs — and in the future there will be “billions and billions” such graphs….

I do feel, however, that using the number “6 billion” is unfortunate — because that would almost make it seem like there might be a 1-to-1 relationship between the number of people and the number of personal relationships and/or roles any single person can take on. Indeed: Every person probably plays a role in many social graphs — perhaps up to the “extreme” perspective that every person plays a role in every social graph (i.e., it could be an “infinitesimally small” role — but still some role [e.g. it could be so small as to be simply “imperceptible”]).

In this vein, I might venture that about 6 billion people play an imperceptible role in almost any social graph (be that the facebook.com graph or the youtube.com graph or the web-strategist.com graph), and only a comparatively small number play a “significant” role. Each of these graphs will be related to other graphs in the network known as the “world-wide web” (www) of social graphs — and it was Google’s “bright idea” to harness this information to add significantly to the information retrieval process.

What the engineers at Google overlooked, however, is that not all social graphs are alike. A “movies.com” social graph is essentially different than a “hotels.com” social graph — but still, Google’s algorithms do not differentiate among them. If I were to search on movies.com for “paris hilton”, then I would expect different results than if I searched for “paris hilton” on hotels.com (and precisely because these “online properties” are something like two different “graphical maps” of two different aspects of the real world. One-size-fits-all search engines, however, have not yet caught on that information retrieval is not simply a matter of applying the same to all phenomena. Perhaps I could echo E.F. Schumacher’s notion of “appropriate technology” and suggest that successful search / information retrieval technology may very well crucially depend on applying “appropriate measuring sticks”.

In stark contrast, we now observe that Google and other search engines have instead chosen to disable their previous “technological breakthrough” (since they have introduced “nofollow” links) and instead offer whatever the highest bidder is willing to pay.

In sum, my guess is that sites like digg.com and/or facebook.com are successful primarily due to the ludicrous nonsense that has come out of Google over the past couple years. As time goes on, social graphs will continue to become more focused and/or specialized — and one-size-fits-all engines would do well to observe that cars.com has something to do with graphing the topic “cars”, just as baby.com has something to do with graphing the topic “baby” (and I guess more and more strategists will also recognize that it maybe be useful to play more than merely an insignificant role in such graphs).